| Subject: | Re: [socialcredit] Re: Article by Richard Cook | | Date: | Monday, December 17, 2007 22:53:05 (-0500) | | From: | Joe Thomson <thomsonhiyu @....ca>
|
| In reply to: | Message 5139 (written by william_b_ryan) |
(Bill Ryan wrote:-) "Richard's thought seems to be a hodgepodge of
contradictory Greenbacker, Georgist and Social Credit elements."
(Joe replies:-) That was my initial impression, too. Maybe Richard might
care to address a few of the more contradictory elements below.
(Richard Cook wrote:-) Money should be viewed by progressives as a) a
medium of exchange,
(Joe asks:-) Not "effective demand", Richard? Douglas, in his testimony
before the Alberta Agricultural Committee in 1934 went to considerable
lengths to explain that modern money was no longer primarily a 'medium of
exchange'.
It doesn't seem very 'progressive' to me if what was shown to be the case
in 1934 is being viewed 'regressively' in our times. Here is what he said
there:-
(Douglas:-) The point of
view that I have is that the function of money is no longer that of a medium
of exchange.
"Q. I agree with you in that entirely, that money is
simply the means of transferring real wealth from one
person to another.
(Douglas:-) . No, that is exactly what it is not.
"Q. You state it is like a ticket on the railway that
enables you to get transportation from one place to
another. I will take that view, that money is a means
of transfer for that transportation.
(Douglas:-) . That is not the correct interpretation of money.
The only correct one is, I believe, that all wealth at the present time is
produced by synthetic purposes: that the wheat that the farmer grows does
not produce any wealth at all; that the manufacturer of motor cars
does not produce any wealth at all.
Those things only become wealth by reason of the fact that somebody else
produces roads, and somebody else bakes the farmer's wheat, and a number of
such things. So it is impossible to say that anyone, at the present time,
produces wealth, except considered in the light of what everybody else is
doing at the present time.
Under those conditions, wealth is a central pool into which everybody is
contributing, and the proper function of money is not to interchange between
those separate producers of wealth, but to give the general community, by
whom the wealth is produced, the necessary power to draw from the central
pool of wealth."
(Richard:-) . Direct spending of money into circulation by the government is
derided by financiers and conservatives as inflationary. Actually, it is no
more inflationary than bank-issued credit and may actually be less so.
(Joe asks:-) I think that last sentence is what Douglas might have called
"carefully worded", Richard. "...it is no MORE inflationary....and MAY
actually be LESS so."
In other words, it still IS 'inflationary', only depending on the degree
to which EITHER is done, right?
(Richard:-) All banking in the United States has been fractional reserve
banking, where a bank is allowed to lend more money than it holds in
deposit.
(Joe asks:-) If ''loans create deposits'' how could it be otherwise?
|
Re: [socialcredit]
Reply to this message